Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.

The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing.

All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only to find that the item changed as I was hitting the down arrow.

And don't get me started on user elements that have a new position in the menu system for every release, if they even have a decent menu system.

View on HN

That is the worst thing. Updating a UI while the user is interacting with it.

Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//.

This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do this, if it's based on a distinct UI element that is not 'activate the list'.)

I think of this frequently when I interact with bad offenders, Like Waze on my phone. I have like 2 addresses starred in addition to the home and work slots. It should PIN those, in a fixed (probably alphabetical) order under the home and work slots. If it's not going to do that for starred items (maybe I have 300 addresses?) it should give me a different widget to pin them.

I would add that adding to an end of a list dynamically can be okay (if it doesn’t cause previous content to jump as you mention).

It's less egregious, but remember that clicking away from the list (e.g. to close it) is also often an input option. Even though that's a lower input priority it could still disrespect the user's desires if they were trying to leave the list.

You are right, then perhaps leaving a placeholder area which is already bigger to accommodate some additional content? Eg. showing 3 actual lines plus a placeholder of additional 10, which might remain empty (but shows a loading indicator before)?

I estimate I have about 100 daily counts of frustration because of elements moving while I'm interacting with the UI. It drives me crazy, and I assume it drives younger people even crazier because they have quicker reaction times.

It's a disgrace that modern UIs haven't dealt with this.

I had high hopes for Windows Phone because it was the only mobile OS that had a realtime UI. I don't care how long an operation takes. Just give me immediate feedback! And respond to my input as if it was mission critical. Why is it so hard?

Related: If I type 'ha' for "Hacker News" in Safari's address bar on my iPhone, by the second letter it'll show "Hacker News". But if I'm too quick to hit "Go" on the keyboard, Safari instead searches DuckDuckGo for "ha".

The UI must update sooner than some underlying state; this bites me multiple times a day.

I was just thinking about how windows xp and old linux DEs (Gnome 2, KDE3) somehow felt snappier and now I'm wondering if the rise of multicore/multiprocessing is to blame. When the windowing stack is running in the same physical core as the kernel maybe it's harder for these things to become disconnected.

Mobile Safari didn't used to do that. I wanna say they introduced that bug a year or two ago. It annoys me constantly and it's worrisome that they haven't fixed it yet.

Oh, don't get me started... MS Teams has been doing this recently at work. Everyone is pinning messages, because when you hover over the Edit menu item for a message and go to click it, two more menu items load asynchronously below it, and switch the Edit button out for a Pin Message button right when you go to click it. And it's not even consistently like that, just sometimes. It's infuriating...

Personally what I hate the most is heart icon randomly suddenly appearing exactly where I wanted to click resulting in me adding hearth icons to completely nonsensical messages.

Teams are the worst.

The teams share screen “menu” is stubbornly stack on a strategic real estate with no way to hide or minimize. Consequently, it usually hides the browser tab I’m on.

But the best part is throwing in some rdp. The teams share screen rect is carefully designed to cover the entire Remote Desktop title which is required to resize it.

I recently had to use the Outlook web client to send an email and the experience was nothing short of horrendous. The autocomplete feature kept eating keypresses unless I typed exactly what it was expecting, or accepted what it wanted me to say, and pressed tab. Of course, I can type faster than it can predict, so I'd be done with a word before the prediction would show up, and the damn thing would eat the space and the first two or three letters of the next work.

Who the hell is working on this stuff?

Yes!! This seems to be something from the last couple of months. It's so annoying. Though in terms of teams it has many annoyances to compete with..

Also for some reason I often seem to bring up the edit menu on the comment above the one I wanted to pick

The app search in both iOS and Android do this to this day. Every time I launch an app I didn’t intend to launch because it popped into the results suddenly, I nearly throw my phone. It’s literally rage inducing.

How hard is it just to grep The list of local apps on a device entirely before showing me the results? Why on earth does it even take a notable amount of time?

I don’t say this lightly when I say someone should be fired. Everyone on every level of every who let this exist should be blackballed by the entire industry. Managers, QA. Someone should’ve spoken up. It’s an absolute moral failure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com